jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Fri May 27 09:37:05 CDT 2011
I second the autonumber as the (surrogate) PK but I use a hash (discussed previously) to hash the full name and DOB (in this case) to get as unique an identifier as you possibly can boiled down to a single field. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com On 5/26/2011 2:26 PM, John Clark wrote: > 1) > The data for the program I am working on, comes w/no real good unique identifier, so I'm trying to create my own. The only personal data I am getting is name (last, first, MI) and DoB. The rest is survey data. This is a dental survey form, and they want to track clients if/as they go from infant to adult, so I told them we need some sort of identifier. > > The method I've come up with, to create an identifier is using the 1st 3 letters of the last name, the 1st 2 of the first name, the middle initial...if there isn't one, I place an "X" into the ID...then 6 digits of DoB. > > For example: a client named Joe T Murphy, born on Dec 7th, 1994 would be assigned an ID of MURJOT120794 > > It is not air-tight, so to speak, but I don't see another way...I'm just looking for opinions on this... > > 2) > This one is a dumb one... > > I don't like whole screen forms, if they're not needed. In all the earlier versions of access, if you didn't have your form maximized in design view, it would default to run in a smaller window. But, w/A07 it doesn't seem to work this way. My form keeps running full screen and I don't want that...how do I do this? > > Thanks...J Clark